This Is How It Really Sounds (19 page)

“This is where Cody'd come in handy.”

“Cody. Wow. I haven't thought about him in a while.”

“I think about him a lot.”

“Yeah, you came down to L.A. with him. That's right. You two grew up together.”

“Yeah. Hey. You remember that time our bus broke down outside Wilksbury, Pennsylvania? And there was that barn, and that field, and that house?” Duffy looked foggy. “We'd played Cleveland the night before and ate some mushrooms, and then we woke up at this old gas station in the middle of nowhere at, like, five in the morning. And I started walking across that field, and you and Bobby and Cody hollered down at me…” He waited for Duffy's face to change, but there was no spark. He sighed. “Shit gets away from you, doesn't it? Forget it.” He changed the mood. “Hey man—good day's work! An hour and a half, a song and a half. It should always be this easy. We could do a whole album in a weekend.”

“Let's crack open a beer!”

Just then the singer's cell phone started beeping, and Harrington flopped himself on the floor and counted out twenty push-ups. He struggled through the last three, slower and slower on each one, until he stalled halfway through the twentieth and then managed to fight his way to the top. He stood up again, red in the face, breathing hard. “I'm in training.”

“For what?”

He led him to the other room, where the big black cylinder of leather loomed from the ceiling.

“What's up with the punching bag?”

“I told you, I'm training.”

“Boxing?”

“No. Ass kicking.”

Duffy looked unsure of what to think. “You're getting in shape. Good man.”

Pete knew Duffy well, and right now Duffy was thinking,
He wants to make a comeback, and that's cool in some ways and it sucks in other ways, because he's probably just too old, too past it. Who needs a forty-five-year-old front man?
And Duffy was thinking,
Crap, I hope he doesn't tap me, because I've got a good solid gig with Face the Cobra, and I don't want things screwed up. It was a good song, though. It was an excellent fucking song!

Duffy pawed at the bag a couple of times.

“Like this—” Pete stepped in and hit the bag with a satisfying smack, then another.

“You're really into this! Are you planning a rematch with the bassist from Uncle Sam's Erection?”

“No. I'm planning for a rematch with Crossroads Partners.”

“Who are they?”

“The ones who lost all my money. Created by a guy named Peter Harrington—yeah, I know, ironic, let's move on. He cooked up some sort of bond fund and sold out for three hundred million. Then he bet against it, and when the crash came he walked away with another four hundred mil. Fucking betting against the people who'd just bought him out.”

“That's fucked up.”

“Yeah, but since he and his buddies basically wrote the fucking laws, everything he did was legal.”

“Been a lot of that going around.”

“No shit. But in this case, I know exactly who did it and where he lives, and I'm training to go kick the crap out of him.”

The guitarist raised his eyebrows. “Would that place he lives by any chance be Shanghai?” Pete smiled, and his old friend laughed. “You're really going to go all the way to Shanghai to get this guy?”

“I'd fucking dive down to the wreck of the
Titanic
and bitchslap this punk on the quarterdeck if I had to! Bankers, bond traders, hedge fund vultures: they think they're fucking untouchable. I'm going to show that they're not.”

“Right on, Pete. You're still an American hero.” The singer flinched inside at the American hero tag, but Duffy rolled on. “So, you've got, like, a personal trainer?”

No use lying about it. “I'm doing it myself, right now, actually.”

Duffy looked at him queerly, because to be doing something alone, without even an assistant, was suspect. This was L.A., and you were supposed to have your team: your assistant, your stylist, your publicist, your manager. If you didn't have a team, it was because you weren't worth it.

Pete headed him off. “That's right, man. Old-style. Alone. Fucking
Taxi Driver
shit. But I did get some help from this guy who used to be a CIA assassin.”

Duffy raised his eyebrows, impressed. “That's kind of heavy. Where'd you find him?”

“I didn't. You put the word out and he finds you.”

“Sounds like a drug deal.”

“Payback
is
a drug.” He put his finger in the air: “Song title! Anyway, I'm training.”

“Are you going to, like,
stalk
this guy? In China? What if he's got a bodyguard?”

“I don't know, Duffy. But it's on. I
will
give that fucker his day of reckoning.”

His friend nodded his head gently as he looked at him. “Cool. You're fired up. You're going it alone. You're flipping
crazy
! But that's what makes great rock and roll.”

“Just climbing the mountain, my man. Climbing the fucking mountain. You still want that beer?”

This was where, if he'd been back at his old house, they would have kicked back by the pool and Matthew would have brought them a few beers and they would have drank until it was time to go get dinner, then drank some more. As it was, he got Duffy a beer and himself a diet soda, and they sat in his living room listening to Robert Johnson while Duff told him about the tour with Face the Cobra. He'd been sorely tempted on that one: the girls in London had been more outrageous than usual, and his wife was running out of forgiveness. The tour had gone well and the houses had been good, though by the time the tour manager finished charging them for their expenses, who knew how much money would be left? The fucking suits at the label were trying to renegotiate their contract, downward of course, complaining how the music business was dying, so bad these days that even parasites like them were having trouble making a living. Duff went on like that for a while, and Harrington would have been bothered to hear about someone else's successful tour, even Duff's, except that today they'd actually roughed out a new song. A great one, with real single potential, and he felt like he was in the game again, even without a band. Duff would come along, if he pushed him. They'd hit the big time together, as kids. That still counted for something. There'd be a lot of crap for Duffy getting permission from the label. But that didn't matter. He'd written a song. A good one, and he could feel that old power running through him, the current that got a man up on stage across from twenty thousand people to shout,
Hello, Akron! Hello, Seattle!
Nothing to hide behind but eyeliner and a microphone, throwing out his chest and screaming to cut through the darkness and blast away everything that had ever been sensible and finite and reasonable and confined by rules and protocol that fucked you over and made you old.
Hello, New York! Hello, Los Angeles! Hello, Shanghai!

*   *   *

By the time a month had passed, he'd written six new songs. “Kickin' It,” “Vanity Fair,” “Never Grow Old,” “Cold, Hard, and Dangerous,” “Buried Alive,” and “Perfect.” Duffy had worked on all of them, and they shared the songwriting credit, which was good, because with songwriting credit came publishing royalties, and that was where the money was. Duffy had a stake in it now. And Bobby—for the first time in years Bobby didn't seem to be sleepwalking through his career. Bobby would check in with him every week or so or stop by the apartment and listen to the latest cuts. He'd firmed up another date on the tour, and actually seemed to be working the phone a little harder to line up more gigs.

He was also up to thirty push-ups. When he hit the bag, he moved it. Not with a little push, but with a loud smack and a little shock wave that made it flex around his fist, like the bag was taking a little tiny bow. He'd done the trap and hit at least twenty thousand times, by his count, and when he finally worked up the nerve to go back to the health club, a trainer there taught him how to throw a hook and do a front kick, and he incorporated those motions into his routine. He went to the club every day now, worked with the trainer, rode the exercise bike, did the strange exercises Charlie had taught him, even though everyone stared at him, and finally, drenched in sweat, he'd sit down to read a magazine. He still didn't know how he would find and confront Peter Harrington in Shanghai. He tried to put together an MO from various private-eye shows he'd seen on TV. He'd enter a squash tournament and punch him out on the court. He'd charm the receptionist at the Portman Hotel Health Club and get the dirtbag's address. He'd follow him on the street with his collar turned up and one of those earbud radios talking with some dude on the other end of it, saying shit like “I've got a visual!” or “The package is moving.” If he had to, he'd fly to Shanghai and make it up as he went along.

He missed Charlie a little bit, since he was the one whose routine he was following. Even though Charlie had dumped him, Pete reasoned that maybe that was just what had to happen. Charlie thought he couldn't do it, but Charlie was all the people who'd ever told him he couldn't do something, whether it was moving to L.A., or hitting it big with the DreamKrushers, or going solo. On and off during his workouts he'd think of the old man, thinking,
Check this out, Charlie!
In a way, Charlie was present. He didn't know how present until he sauntered into the cool-down area one day and sat in his usual chair. On the table next to it was a copy of
Modern Maturity
magazine. He looked at it, on top of a stack of other magazines; then he glanced around the room. A couple of people noticed him—he was still Pete Harrington—but he knew better this time. He picked up the magazine. The note was inserted next to the first page:

65 WU LI LANE. LET'S TALK.

He found the old man waiting patiently outside the club. He felt like hugging him. “Charlie, man, you punked me again!”

Charlie, smiling at him, reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “You gotta have a little fun in this business or it gets you down. I heard you finally learned how to throw a punch.”

“Don't make me drop you, old man!”

Charlie raised his eyebrows amiably; then his face suddenly changed and he gave a guttural snarl and slowly reached for Harrington's throat with both hands. The musician reflexively reached up and grabbed Charlie's wrists, and before he knew it, without feeling anything but a gentle insistence from Charlie, he found himself somehow turned around backward and hunched down with his wrist at the breaking point and his arm locked stiffly out to the side. He was pinned in place like an insect, looking at the lower front door of the health club.

He heard Charlie laughing again up above him; then he was turned loose. The old man's yellow wolfish teeth were exposed in an expression of pure joy. “Oh, that was funny!”

“What the hell did you do?”

“Just a little Chin-na. You may need more than a month of training to drop me.”

“Teach me how to do that!”

Charlie started walking down the street, and Pete followed him. “I'm sure you wouldn't find it very interesting.”

“No, seriously!”

“It's old-guy stuff.”

“C'mon, Charlie! Cut me in on the good shit!”

Charlie turned to him. “Maybe later. How many push-ups can you do?”

“I'm up to thirty an hour. I can do forty, max.”

“On your knuckles?”

“Does this answer your question?” He made a fist in front of Charlie's face, hearing the joints crackle into a solid ball of bones and muscle. The knuckles were covered with thick yellow calluses.

“Let's see.”

“Here? On the street?” They were on the sidewalk between a law office and a kosher deli. At any given moment there were three or four people passing by.

“Right here. On your knuckles.”

Pete dropped to the ground. He could feel the pebbly surface of the concrete, but the skin was thickened enough that he didn't feel any pain. He knocked out thirty push-ups quickly, slowed down progressively on the next six, labored heavily on the following three, then stalled halfway up on his fortieth before fighting his way to the top. Just before he finished, Charlie said, “Do one more.”

He went down again but there was nothing left in his arms. He could see people's ankles slowing down and halting around him. He pushed as hard as he could, but his body didn't rise from the pavement. His arms began trembling.

Charlie's voice came down to him, harder than he'd ever heard it. “Do it!”

He summoned everything he had and focused all of it into his arms. It was the entire universe squeezed into one gesture of will, there on the Fairfax Avenue sidewalk with its pedestrians and its litter of car horns and paper cups and plastic bags and stray music. If he failed, he would fall on his face. He rose a quarter inch, then an inch, and with that movement he seemed to build some unlikely momentum and shivered slowly to the top and held himself there. He hesitated a moment, and then, when Charlie said nothing, he bent his knee underneath himself and stood up, breathing hard and feeling the blood swelling in his face. He faced the trainer, who looked at him levely, his slightly cloudy blue eyes unyielding. “Are you still going to Shanghai?”

“Yeah,” he puffed.

“That's a coincidence. Because I've been thinking of going there myself. I've got some loose ends to tie up.”

Pete grinned. “Let's do it!” He lifted up his fist for a bump, but Charlie just looked at it.

“What's that for?”

“It's a fist bump, Charlie. We bump knuckles.”

The old man carefully raised his fist and moved it gently toward Pete Harrington's until it touched.

“
Hell yeah!
” the musician said. “I told you I'd keep the faith, Charlie.”